The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

church exists. Heresy is the obverse

side of the Church. Wherever there is a church, there must be the

conception of heresy. A church is a body of men who assert that

they are in possession of infallible truth. Heresy is the opinion

of the men who do not admit the infallibility of the Church’s

truth.

 

Heresy makes its appearance in the Church. It is the effort to

break through the petrified authority of the Church. All effort

after a living comprehension of the doctrine has been made by

heretics. Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Huss,

Savonarola, Helchitsky, and the rest were heretics. It could not

be otherwise.

 

The follower of Christ, whose service means an ever-growing

understanding of his teaching, and an ever-closer fulfillment of

it, in progress toward perfection, cannot, just because he is a

follower, of Christ, claim for himself or any other that he

understands Christ’s teaching fully and fulfills it. Still less

can he claim this for any body of men.

 

To whatever degree of understanding and perfection the follower of

Christ may have attained, he always feels the insufficiency of his

understanding and fulfillment of it, and is always striving toward

a fuller understanding and fulfillment. And therefore, to assert

of one’s self or of any body of men, that one is or they are in

possession of perfect understanding and fulfillment of Christ’s

word, is to renounce the very spirit of Christ’s teaching.

 

Strange as it may seem, the churches as churches have always been,

and cannot but be, institutions not only alien in spirit to

Christ’s teaching, but even directly antagonistic to it. With

good reason Voltaire calls the Church l’inf�me; with good reason

have all or almost all so-called sects of Christians recognized

the Church as the scarlet woman foretold in the Apocalypse; with

good reason is the history of the Church the history of the

greatest cruelties and horrors.

 

The churches as churches are not, as many people suppose,

institutions which have Christian principles for their basis, even

though they may have strayed a little away from the straight path.

The churches as churches, as bodies which assert their own

infallibility, are institutions opposed to Christianity. There is

not only nothing in common between the churches as such and

Christianity, except the name, but they represent two principles

fundamentally opposed and antagonistic to one another. One

represents pride, violence, self-assertion, stagnation, and death;

the other, meekness, penitence, humility, progress, and life.

 

We cannot serve these two masters; we have to choose between

them.

 

The servants of the churches of all denominations, especially of

later times, try to show themselves champions of progress in

Christianity. They make concessions, wish to correct the abuses

that have slipped into the Church, and maintain that one cannot,

on account of these abuses, deny the principle itself of a

Christian church, which alone can bind all men together in unity

and be a mediator between men and God. But this is all a mistake.

Not only have churches never bound men together in unity; they

have always been one of the principal causes of division between

men, of their hatred of one another, of wars, battles,

inquisitions, massacres of St. Bartholomew, and so on. And the

churches have never served as mediators between men and God. Such

mediation is not wanted, and was directly forbidden by Christ, who

has revealed his teaching directly and immediately to each man.

But the churches set up dead forms in the place of God, and far

from revealing God, they obscure him from men’s sight. The

churches, which originated from misunderstanding of Christ’s

teaching and have maintained this misunderstanding by their

immovability, cannot but persecute and refuse to recognize all

true understanding of Christ’s words. They try to conceal this,

but in vain; for every step forward along the path pointed out for

us by Christ is a step toward their destruction.

 

To hear and to read the sermons and articles in which Church

writers of later times of all denominations speak of Christian

truths and virtues; to hear or read these skillful arguments that

have been elaborated during centuries, and exhortations and

professions, which sometimes seem like sincere professions, one is

ready to doubt whether the churches can be antagonistic to

Christianity. “It cannot be,” one says, “that these people who

can point to such men as Chrysostom, F�nelon, Butler, and others

professing the Christian faith, were antagonistic to

Christianity.” One is tempted to say, “The churches may have

strayed away from Christianity, they may be in error, but they

cannot be hostile to it.” But we must look to the fruit to judge

the tree, as Christ taught c us. And if we see that their fruits

were evil, that the results of their activity were antagonistic to

Christianity, we cannot but admit that however good the men were—

the work of the Church in which these men took part was not

Christian. The goodness and worth of these men who served the

churches was the goodness and worth of the men, and not of the

institution they served. All the good men, such as Francis of

Assisi, and Francis of Sales, our Tihon Zadonsky, Thomas � Kempis,

and others, were good men in spite of their serving an institution

hostile to Christianity, and they would have been still better if

they had not been under the influence of the error which they were

serving.

 

But why should we speak of the past and judge from the past, which

may have been misrepresented and misunderstood by us? The

churches, with their principles and their practice, are not a

thing of the past. The churches are before us to-day, and we can

judge of them to some purpose by their practical activity, their

influence on men.

 

What is the practical work of the churches to-day? What is their

influence upon men? What is done by the churches among us, among

the Catholics and the Protestants of all denominations—what is

their practical work? and what are the results of their practical

work?

 

The practice of our Russian so-called Orthodox Church is plain to

all. It is an enormous fact which there is no possibility of

hiding and about which there can be no disputing.

 

What constitutes the practical work of this Russian Church, this

immense, intensely active institution, which consists of a

regiment of half a million men and costs the people tens of

millions of rubles?

 

The practical business of the Church consists in instilling by

every conceivable means into the mass of one hundred millions of

the Russian people those extinct relics of beliefs for which there

is nowadays no kind of justification, “in which scarcely anyone

now believes, and often not even those whose duty it is to diffuse

these false beliefs.” To instill into the people the formulas of

Byzantine theology, of the Trinity, of the Mother of God, of

Sacraments, of Grace, and so on, extinct conceptions, foreign to

us, and having no kind of meaning for men of our times,

forms only one part of the work of the Russian Church. Another

part of its practice consists in the maintenance of idol-worship

in the most literal meaning of the word; in the veneration of holy

relics, and of ikons, the offering of sacrifices to them, and the

expectation of their answers to prayer. I am not going to speak

of what is preached and what is written by clergy of scientific or

liberal tendencies in the theological journals. I am going to

speak of what is actually done by the clergy through the wide

expanse of the Russian land among a people of one hundred

millions. What do they, diligently, assiduously, everywhere

alike, without intermission, teach the people? What do they

demand from the people in virtue of their (so-called) Christian

faith?

 

I will begin from the beginning with the birth of a child. At the

birth of a child they teach them that they must recite a prayer

over the child and mother to purify them, as though without this

prayer the mother of a newborn child were unclean. To do this the

priest holds the child in his arms before the images of the saints

(called by the people plainly gods) and reads words of exorcizing

power, and this purifies the mother. Then it is suggested to the

parents, and even exacted of them, under fear of punishment for

non-fulfillment, that the child must be baptized; that is, be

dipped by the priest three times into the water, while certain

words, understood by no one, are read aloud, and certain actions,

still less understood, are performed; various parts of the body

are rubbed with oil, and the hair is cut, while the sponsors blow

and spit at an imaginary devil. All this is necessary to purify

the child and to make him a Christian. Then it is instilled into

the parents that they ought to administer the sacrament to the

child, that is, give him, in the guise of bread and wine, a

portion of Christ’s body to eat, as a result of which the child

receives the grace of God within it, and so on. Then it is

suggested that the child as it grows up must be taught to pray.

To pray means to place himself directly before the wooden boards

on which are painted the faces of Christ, the Mother of God, and

the saints, to bow his head and his whole body, and to touch his

forehead, his shoulders and his stomach with his right hand,

holding his fingers in a certain position, and to utter some words

of Slavonic, the most usual of which as taught to all children

are: Mother of God, virgin, rejoice thee, etc., etc.

 

Then it is instilled into the child as it is brought up that at

the sight of any church or ikon he must repeat the same action—i.

e., cross himself. Then it is instilled into him that on holidays

(holidays are the days on which Christ was born, though no one

knows when that was, on which he was circumcised, on which the

Mother of God died, on which the cross was carried in procession,

on which ikons have been set up, on which a lunatic saw a vision,

and so on)—on holidays he must dress himself in his best clothes

and go to church, and must buy candles and place them there before

the images of the saints. Then he must give offerings and prayers

for the dead, and little loaves to be cut up into three-cornered

pieces, and must pray many times for the health and prosperity of

the Tzar and the bishops, and for himself and his own affairs, and

then kiss the cross and the hand of the priest.

Besides these observances, it is instilled into him that at

least once a year he must confess. To confess means to go to the

church and to tell the priest his sins, on the theory that this

informing a stranger of his sins completely purifies him from

them. And after that he must eat with a little spoon a morsel of

bread with wine, which will purify him still more. Next it is

instilled into him that if a man and woman want their physical

union to be sanctified they must go to church, put on metal

crowns, drink certain potions, walk three times round a table to

the sound of singing, and that then the physical union of a man

and woman becomes sacred and altogether different from all other

such unions.

 

Further it is instilled into him in his life that he must observe

the following rules: not to eat butter or milk on certain days,

and on certain other days to sing Te Deums and requiems for the

dead, on holidays to entertain the priest and